In memory of Maurice Besset

In 1947, Maurice Besset is appointed director of the French Institute of Innsbruck, which will become a centre of cultural and artistic renewal of the highest importance under his aegis. There, he initiated a multidisciplinary reflection around painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, photography, film, theatre and music. Then, this pioneer attitude brought him to the Musée d’art moderne of Paris, the Université de Besançon, the Musée de Peinture de Grenoble, and finally the Université de Genève.

His cultural approach knew no borders: his actions allowed to overcome stigma, to modificate values in a quest towards what is fundamental in life; this way of thinking excludes any sort of indulgence. It is this attitude of never looking the other way and always getting to the bottom of things that Besset admired in Le Corbusier, of whom he was a friend, legatee and executor and to whom he dedicated many publications.

Maurice Besset was very aware of the poetry of forms; he liked to say that “art has to make things visually intelligible, not philosophically explicable.” His life and work have been characterised by the rigour he saw in the best artists of our time, those who knew how to “diminish the number of strikes to increase the weight of each.”